silence in which I worried everyone could hear my heart thumping angrily against my chest. I had to say something.
“So, Natalie,” I said. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
The bones in my toes crunched beneath Ronni’s boot. Luckily, I no longer felt pain.
“What?” said Natalie.
“Because you don’t normally sit with us,” Jamie explained. No one else would have heard the exasperation in her voice, but I did.
“Oh!” Natalie giggled. “I was like, ‘What?’?”
“I wanted her to,” Jamie cut in. This time it was me who had to feign interest in my food. Jamie and Natalie had band together before lunch, and now I pictured them leaving it together, walking here together, having so much to say to each other that they couldn’t possibly separate for twenty-three minutes.
“Aw,” said Natalie. I tried not to stare as she rested her head on Jamie’s shoulder. I felt Ronni watching me. The warning bell rang, and I leapt up, my sandwich entirely untouched.
“I—forgot a book I need,” I explained hurriedly. “See you guys later.”
I held back tears all the way to my hiding spot, the weird two-stall bathroom at the far end of the hallway between the locker rooms and the gym. I allowed myself a brief cry while I ate my sandwich on the toilet, and when the second warning bell rang, I got up, splashed water on my face, and reentered the terrible world outside.
That night, I decided something had to be done.
Jamie had tried extra hard to talk to me in Civil Liberties, and I had ignored her, pretending to be fully absorbed in the Fourth Amendment. I smiled once at Ruby across the room, and while she smiled back, it was pinched and joyless. After class I caught her in the hallway, but I had soccer to get to, and she had a ride to catch, and I didn’t want to know who with, so we only talked for a minute. No acknowledgment of the rose garden or the mythical hand-holding was made. Ruby said she’d text me later, and I said, “Okay, I’ll text you a reminder.” This, at last, made her smile for real.
Here was my secret: I’d used that line before. And as soon as I said it to Ruby, all I could think about was the time I’d said it to Jamie. And then, for some reason, I pictured Jamie using it on Natalie.
It was then and there that I decided the reason I wasn’t moving forward with Ruby was because Jamie kept dragging me backward. It wasn’t even the real her, because the real her was clearly occupied with Natalie freaking Reid. It was last-year Jamie, last-summer Jamie, who was still squatting in my brain. I didn’t want everything I did with Ruby to only be a shadow of something I’d already done with Jamie. If I was ever to be so lucky as to kiss Ruby, I didn’t want to compare it to anything else.
So after I ate the dinner my mom had left out for me, and poked my head into her office so we could confirm we’d both lived through the day, I went into my room, closed the door, and removed the pieces of Jamie from their hiding spots one by one. I slipped the note from The Return of the King that changed everything. From under my mattress, I removed the photo-booth strip of us making faces and kissing. I surveyed the room like a crime scene, collecting every potential clue: the movie-ticket stubs; the hair ties she’d left behind; the books she’d lent me, her name and the year printed neatly inside each cover. Once all that was done, I could no longer pretend I wasn’t avoiding the most incriminating evidence of all: the shoebox that held our letters, pushed deep under my bed.
The plan was not to reread them. The plan was to throw them away, or maybe even burn them. But I had never once cleaned my room without first examining every object I’d ever owned, no matter how many times I’d done so before. I studied the box from all angles, like a foreign object I’d only just dug up. On the